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Shaping Europe- The Post War Fallout
No full textThe aim was to develop, create, archive and publish digital artefacts of the personal testimonials of a sample of World War Two refugees and the experiences of Post War British civilians.
The digitally recorded testimonials were researched, produced and directed by Fiona Graham. (They are a work in progress and will be edited to publish in 2018)
Polish, Belgium and British nationals were contacted and researched to be interviewed. The British and European testimonials give a detailed, personal authored account into the situation in Britain and Europe during and at the immediate end of World War Two, examples include:
* Personal British Army male testimonial witnessing post War Europe and the occupation of Germany directly following the end of the War.
* Personal authored account of a Belgium female refugee who escaped the Nazis to live in the UK. Her personal journey and analysis of Post War Europe and refugees and with reference to the refugee crisis today.
* Personal authored account of a Polish Tank Commander in World War Two about his experience both in the War and his account of the Post War fallout and moving to live in the UK.
* Personal authored account of a British civilian living in Stoke on Trent area: an authored account living in the UK as a child immediately after the end of World War Two.
The personal accounts were developed and each person interviewed and recorded using audio and HD camera technology by director of photography Paul Ottey. The decision was made to record the subjects in their own home environments to provide current context to the stories and to provide a contrast to many testimonial interviews that are created on a generic or isolated backdrop.
Note: the project is ongoing to be released to local museums and online publication.
The interviews are stored at the following links with the password ref2020
https://vimeo.com/230897668
https://vimeo.com/230897577
https://vimeo.com/230897439
https://vimeo.com/230897316
https://vimeo.com/230897120
https://vimeo.com/230897019
The unedited films of Post War experiences include interview and are:
IV 1 Polish Tank Commander filmed at the Polish Embassy in London
IV 4 War Veteran and liberator in Germany from Stoke on Trent
IV 5 Belgium refugee who escaped the Nazis living in Birmingham
IV 6 Post War child from Smallthorne, Staffordshire mining tow
Game On - Understanding Representation in Boardgames Design
No full textA paper given to the 'Game On' event at the Victoria and Albert Museum for childhood, examining how representation can be used in games
Rethinking the 'video nasties' : economics, marketing, and distribution
No full textThere are two things that most people know about the ‘video nasties.’ The first is that prior to 1984 the video industry was completely unregulated and the absence of any regulation allowed a space for immoral and disreputable elements of the businesses to thrive. The second is that a series of public complaints about the advertising used to promote the ‘video nasties’ triggered a moral panic that led to introduction of the Video Recordings Act in 1984. Neither of these statements is entirely true, but both have allowed a popular history to persist that continues to hold the independent distributor directly accountable for the events that led to a scheme of government sanctioned censorship that continues to this day. Through exploring the marketing and distribution of the ‘video nasties’, this thesis will challenge this established history and will contextualise the ‘video nasties’ within the emerging landscape of the wider home video industry. Moving beyond the explicitly social readings that have dominated these histories and that have positioned them as an explicitly British concern, this study offers a reading that considers the ‘video nasties’ as part of, and not separate from, a broader global film industry and wider industrial practice. This will be accomplished over three sections. In the first section I will detail the established social history before reconsidering the accuracy of this narrative when it is considered alongside a previously neglected economic and technological history. This context will provide the foundation for the rest of the thesis, providing a basis that reconceptualises the ‘video nasties’ both historically and as part of wider film markets. In the second section I will return to the claims made against the promotional strategies of the early distributors and historicise this type of promotion, tracing a lineage to the ballyhoo of William Castle and the early promotions of P.T Barnum. This will provide context for a study that considers the marketing and branding of both the films and the companies that produced them, following the market through Video, DVD and Blu-ray. The final section documents the evolution of both the product and the marketplace, considering how theoretical constructs arising from film studies can help us understand the marketplace of the ‘video nasties’. The thesis is a revisionist history that reconsiders the birth of the independent video industry in the United Kingdom through the films and distributors that were marginalised and castigated
Longitudinal Changes in Elite Rowers’ Challenge and Threat Appraisals of Pressure Situations: A Season-Long Observational Study
Get PDFChallenge cognitive appraisals are associated with superior performance compared to threat (Jones, Meijen, McCarthy, & Sheffield, 2009). However, research has not examined longitudinal temporal patterns of challenge and threat appraisals. In this study, 14 (five female) elite rowers (Mage = 25.79 years, SD = 2.67) provided self-reported appraisals data at four time points (baseline; before national trials; before the second world rowing cup regatta; and before the world rowing championships). The rowers’ predisposed appraisal style predicted subsequent appraisals. Challenge and self-efficacy increased while loss and avoidance appraisals decreased over time. The rowers were highly predisposed to challenge, becoming more challenged through events of increasing magnitude. This suggests that athletes’ predisposed appraisal style can predict their approach to competition. Future studies could identify protocols for encouraging challenge states in athletes, observe the physiological indicators of challenge and threat longitudinally, and could consider the interaction between challenge and threat appraisals
Examining the effectiveness of a Rational Emotive Personal-Disclosure Mutual-Sharing (REPDMS) intervention on the irrational beliefs, rational beliefs, and emotions of Greek adolescent athletes
Get PDFThe present study examined the effects of a Rational Emotive Personal-Disclosure Mutual-Sharing (REPDMS) intervention on the rational and irrational beliefs of a group of Greek adolescent athletes that had previously participated in a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) educational workshop. Measurements were taken before REBT workshops (baseline), during the REBT workshop period, and after the REPDMS session (post-intervention). Further, a comparison group received REBT education, but did not receive REPDMS, allowing the between-subjects comparison between participants who received REPDMS and participants who did not. Findings support the hypotheses that REPDMS has positive effects on further reducing irrational beliefs, enhancing rational beliefs, and prolonging the duration of these positive effects, over and above REBT education alone. Qualitative inspection of the REPDMS transcript also revealed participant perceptions of REBT, and served to stimulate critical author reflections on REPDM
‘Stan Orme and the Road to ‘Industrial Democracy’: British attempts at the Politicisation of Working Class Protestants in Northern Ireland 1973-1975.’: McCann, David, and McGrattan, Cillian, ed. (2017) Sunningdale and the Struggle for Democracy in Northern Ireland. Manchester University Press.
No full textAs Minister of State in Northern Ireland 1974-1976, Stanley Orme MP (1923-2005) worked at the heart of British government policies that attempted to ameliorate and politicise the membership of those loyalist groups that had successfully brought down the power sharing executive in 1974. Orme followed and extended a government policy of often secret engagement of those outside the mainstream of Northern Ireland politics; a policy that successfully brought about the Provisional IRA’s 1975 ceasefire, but which failed to bring the UVF into electoral politics with the dismal performance of the Volunteer Political Party in the 1974 general elections. Orme’s approach, outlined in the 1975 pamphlet ‘Industrial Democracy’ encouraged workers’ participation in the newly nationalised Harland and Wolff shipyard and was a direct attempt to politicise the Protestant working classes of Belfast. Orme attempted to redirect their support away from both existing militant and right-wing groups that at this time included the UDA, UVF and Ulster Vanguard. Orme’s view was that skilled industrial workers belonged within the fold of progressive social democracy and that the extension of government-backed syndicalist activity in the ship yard would empower the workers and help shift Northern Ireland as a whole from sectarian models of political activity to a class based system similar to the rest of the UK. For Orme, ‘Industrial Democracy’ was the ‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland’ and a potential solution to the province’s ills, ‘If the working-class people of Northern Ireland can be convinced that, whatever their religious denominations, they have economic interests in common, they will be able to approach the constitutional problem… with open minds.’ (‘Last Chance for Northern Ireland?’, [undated] c. 1975 LSE Orme 1/3) Using a combination of both Orme’s official and private papers, this chapter seeks to explore and critique Orme’s motivation, his policy, and its effect
Target Detection Architecture for Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks within Internet of Things
No full textWireless sensor networks (WSN) within Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential
to address the growing detection and classi�cation requirements among many
surveillance applications. RF sensing techniques are the next generation technologies
which o�er distinct advantages over traditional passive means of sensing
such as acoustic and seismic which are used for surveillance and target detection
applications of WSN. RF sensing based WSN within IoT detect the presence of
designated targets by transmitting RF signals into the sensing environment and
observing the re
ected echoes. In this thesis, an RF sensing based target detection
architecture for surveillance applications of WSN has been proposed to detect the
presence of stationary targets within the sensing environment.
With multiple sensing nodes operating simultaneously within the sensing region,
diversity among the sensing nodes in the choice of transmit waveforms is required.
Existing multiple access techniques to accommodate multiple sensing nodes within
the sensing environment are not suitable for RF sensing based WSN. In this thesis,
a diversity in the choice of the transmit waveforms has been proposed and transmit
waveforms which are suitable for RF sensing based WSN have been discussed. A
criterion have been de�ned to quantify the ease of detecting the signal and energy
e�ciency of the signal based on which ease of detection index and energy e�ciency
index respectively have been generated. The waveform selection criterion proposed
in this thesis takes the WSN sensing conditions into account and identi�es the
optimum transmit waveform within the available choices of transmit waveforms
based on their respective ease of detection and energy e�ciency indexes.
A target detector analyses the received RF signals to make a decision regarding
the existence or absence of targets within the sensing region. Existing target detectors
which are discussed in the context of WSN do not take the factors such
as interference and nature of the sensing environment into account. Depending
on the nature of the sensing environment, in this thesis the sensing environments are classi�ed as homogeneous and heterogeneous sensing environments. Within
homogeneous sensing environments the presence of interference from the neighbouring
sensing nodes is assumed. A target detector has been proposed for WSN
within homogeneous sensing environments which can reliably detect the presence
of targets. Within heterogeneous sensing environments the presence of clutter and
interfering waveforms is assumed. A target detector has been proposed for WSN
within heterogeneous sensing environments to detect targets in the presence of
clutter and interfering waveforms. A clutter estimation technique has been proposed
to assist the proposed target detector to achieve increased target detection
reliability in the presence of clutter. A combination of compressive and two-step
target detection architectures has been proposed to reduce the transmission costs.
Finally, a 2-stage target detection architecture has been proposed to reduce the
computational complexity of the proposed target detection architecture
Understanding the Unknown: A Thematic Analysis of Subjective Paranormal Experiences
No full textThis study investigated personal accounts of subjective paranormal experiences (SPEs). Ten UK-based participants took part in semi-structured interviews, where they discussed how alleged paranormal experiences made them feel, whether the narrated event(s) was unusual/strange, and what they believed caused the occurrence(s). Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis; a qualitative method that identifies patterns within data. Five central themes emerged (sensory experiences, you are not alone, distortion of reality, personal growth, and socio-cultural factors). Consideration of themes revealed an intricate, inextricable link between perception, interpretation and belief. Generally, SPEs were associated with the desire to comprehend the unknown and a reluctance to accept the uncertain. Findings provided important insights into the phenomenology of paranormal experience, suggested avenues for future research and were consistent with previous findings
The Management of Retention: A Case Study Examining Retention Strategy in a Private Lebanese University Business School
No full textThe retention of students in higher education has received great attention from scholars. Understanding the determinants of students’ decision to continue their studies would be essential for university managers and professors as well as future students. The aim of the present thesis is to investigate the factors that might affect student retention behaviour in the Lebanese International University. A survey was conducted to explore the characteristics of first-year and third-year students. The data collected is based on an extensive questionnaire that covers students’ background information, peer-group and faculty interactions, academic performance, and their perception of the University. Overall, the findings support the Tinto’s model of student integration. Furthermore, the results strongly suggest that students’ proficiency in English may affect their retention decision directly.
The main findings of the study are on the role of academic and social integration in the students’ decision to continue their education. Grade performance and intellectual development are observed to affect students’ goal and institutional commitment. Similarly, commitment is found to be influenced by social interactions with peers and faculty members. The results agree with the Tinto’s theory of student integration and suggest that background factors might have a direct impact on retention. This reflects the thesis’s contribution to the existing theoretical literature which can be important in identifying the key factors behind student retention more accurately in the future research.
The study may also be useful in improving management practices in Lebanese universities as it is based on the analysis of the current state of the Lebanese International University. In particular, it supports the role of academic and social integration in the retention of students. This could be useful for developing practices that improve the experience of first-year students. Most notably, the findings indicate that Lebanese universities should focus on developing appropriate English courses
Single Image Super-Resolution using Back-Propagation Neural Networks
Get PDFThere are several existing mathematical algorithms for colour image upscaling like Nearest Neighbour, Bicubic and Bilinear. This paper firstly investigates the performances of these three and it has been found that Bicubic performs the best in terms of structural similarity and execution time. A Bicubic with backpropagation based ANN method has been proposed to improve the results. Bicubic with ANN shows 6.5% higher SSIM, 6.9% higher PSNR, 8.7% higher SNR and 30.23% lower MSE values than pure Bicubic. The results of Bicubic with ANN are also compared with state of the art super-resolution techniques like SRCNN. Bicubic with ANN produces 1.48% higher SSIM and 3.44% higher PSNR than SRCNN
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